Thandokuhle Manzi And Patrick Bond
27 May 2008
opinion
To convey the reasons and effects of xenophobia in South Africa and its effect on the working class, Thandokuhle Manzi and Patrick Bond take a microscopic look at Cato Manor Township, one of the sites where the attacks took place.
The low-income black township here in Durban which suffered more than any other during apartheid, Cato Manor, was the scene of a fanciful test performed on a Mozambican last Wednesday morning.
At 6:45am, in the warmth of a rising subtropical winter sun, two unemployed men strolling on Belair Road approached the middle-aged immigrant. They accosted him and demanded, in the local indigenous language isiZulu, that he say the word meaning "elbow" (this they referred to with their hand).
The man answered "idolo", which unfortunately means "knee". The correct answer is "indololwane". His punishment: being beat up severely, and then told to "go home".
What was going through those two young thugs' heads? Why did others like them kill more than 50 immigrants in various South African slums last week, leaving tens of thousands more to flee?
Cato Manor has several features that incubate conflict of the type Thando Manzi witnessed - and was powerless to prevent - on his way to high school last Wednesday. The same scene played out dozens if not hundreds of times here in Durban's sprawling townships, where more than 1.5 million people suffer daily indignities.
Indeed, thousands of immigrants were asked such questions by assailants in recent weeks. Many millions heard of the elbow test and saw press coverage of immigrants being burned to death last week in Johannesburg's eastern townships, which ironically house the reserve pools of labour closest to Africa's busiest airport, O.R.Tambo International, the gateway to and from the continent.
Thousands of Zimbabweans and Mozambicans living in Johannesburg and Durban fled to the borders, but most went nearby to police stations, community centres and churches. The notoriously corrupt Cato Manor police station now has several hundred people sheltering in the immediate vicinity, and a large tent was erected for shelter.
A 15-minute drive south of Cato Manor is Chatsworth, whose best known community activist is Orlean Naidoo. She joined Patrick Bond at central Durban's main place of safety, Emmanuel Cathedral, on Thursday night. The Catholic church had taken in 150 terrified Zimbabweans, and that night Naidoo helped rescue another 100 from Chatsworth's Bottlebrush shack settlement. By Sunday that number of refugees at Emmanuel had doubled again.
Our colleague Ashwin Desai documented Chatsworth's role in progressive struggle dating back more than a decade (in his 2002 book We are the Poors). Sadly, last week, a majority of residents voted in a municipal by-election for the welfarist-nationalist Minority Front, with its single-minded emphasis on Indian identity.
And in Bottlebrush, low-income Africans were apparently incited - and immigrants terrorised - by an anonymous pamphlet telling foreigners to leave.
Naidoo notes the rise of racial and class tensions here: "Bottlebrush settlement has never been properly organised," she says. "It is not an easy thing to do, when people are subject to arrest at any time due to lack of formal documents."
In every locale, surface stresses that invite bitter residents to cheer on beatings and ethnic cleansing have deep faultlines. Cato Manor violence appears endemic for several reasons that Thando Manzi hears every day in ordinary conversation, to the point of stereotyping.
To illustrate, a taxi war is now underway, as one owners' association whose market has stagnated attempts to invade Cato Manor turf. Taxi lords from nearby Chesterville - a township two kilometers west - apparently instructed their drivers to begin expanding services into the Cato Manor Taxi Association's routes a few weeks ago.
The Manzi household hears gunshots most evenings, and it is sometimes impossible to move around the township due to flying bullets. One taxilord has been killed and quite a few innocent passengers and bystanders - including a schoolchild - were wounded.
Indeed, long-suffering residents know Cato Manor - named after the city's first white settler mayor - as contested terrain following British settlement in 1843 . A century later, Indians and Africans regained occupation rights, but the apartheid regime soon practiced a sophisticated divide-and-conquer that heightened both ethnic and class cleavages.
By 1949, Cato Manor's unequal internal power relations, evident in petty retail trade and landlordism, generated a backlash by Africans against Indians that left 137 residents dead over two days, with thousands more injured. Recovering from this catastrophe, however, the African National Congress began serious organising, and set the stage for women's uprisings against both the state and African men who patronised the local beerhall (where profits financed local apartheid), instead of consuming the women's homebrew.
Combinations of local grievances plus anti-racist macropolitics meant Cato Manor gender relations were as advanced as anywhere in the country. But by 1964, the apartheid regime overwhelmed social resistance, embarking on mass forced removals, leaving the land just below the University of KwaZulu-Natal vacant for a quarter century.
But like so much of our 'planet of slums', as Mike Davis describes these sites, a new generation of shack settlements then emerged in the interstices of working-class Indian and African communities. The post-apartheid government's construction of tiny housing units, half the size of apartheid "matchboxes", did not help. Too many quickly went onto the market and became unaffordable to Cato Manor's lowest-income residents, though immigrants have bought them and are settling in.
The ethnicised political economy of Cato Manor capitalism creates many such tensions. Speaking at a labour-community-refugee forum on Sunday, Timothy Rukombo, a leader of exiled Zimbabweans in Durban, described how microeconomic friction is displaced into hate-filled nationalism: "If you want to go home [to Zimbabwe], you compare prices and you see the large bus is a little cheaper than the minibus kombitaxi. Then when you go to the bus, the taxi driver shouts loudly that you are makwerekwere", a derogatory term for immigrant just as insulting as "kaffir".
Rukombo continues, "And when we are beaten, and we call the police, they never come." In fact, when police do come - as to Johannesburg's Central Methodist Church on January 30, where 1500 Zimbabweans had taken refuge - then their agenda is often pure brutality. Host bishop Paul Verryn was beaten that evening, and all the Zimbabweans were arrested. But no charges stuck.
These sorts of grievances Thando Manzi hears continually, but on the other side of the conflict from Rukombo. At a time of roaring food price inflation - as high as 80% for basics this year - he prioritises a few structural reasons for his neighbours' xenophobia:
* lack of jobs, as formal sector employment dropped by a million after 1994, and declining wage levels as a result of immigrant willingness to work for low pay on a casualised basis;
* immigrant tenacity in finding informal economic opportunities even when these are illegal, such as streetside trading of fruits, vegetables, cigarettes, toys and other small commodities;
* housing pressure which leads many immigrants to overcrowd inner-city flats especially in Durban and Johannesburg, hence driving up rentals of a dwelling unit beyond the ability of locals to afford; * surname identity theft, which can cost an immigrant R3000 by way of a bribe for an ID document and driver's license (including fake marriages to South Africans who only learn much later); and
* increases in local crime blamed on immigrants.
Behind some of this tension is the recent expansion of the hated migrant labour system. We thought in 1994 that the ANC government would slowly but surely rid the economy of migrancy, and turn single-sex migrant hostels into decent family homes. But hostels remain, and in Johannesburg, the ghastly buildings full of unemployed men were the source of many attacks.
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